African americans in the american west

I started off selling it. I was making a little money, but then I started getting high too much. Pretty soon, I was smoking more than I was selling. My company paid $20,000 for me to spend 30 days at a rehabilitation clinic, $29,000 for the next 30. But they got tired of me going to rehab. I wasn't making any improvement. I was still smoking and messing up my life. So they fired me. That’s why I’m living like I do. I can’t get a job.

I heard they were trying to legalize drugs. That would be the worst thing. Think about it. If they got better cocaine, everyone would try it. You won’t have anybody in this country who isn't on their way to getting strung out. That’s a lie, when people tell you that you won’t have crime [with decriminalization]. I had a heart operation, had a valve replaced. And I’m still smoking. Coke is a cruel mistress. She don’t care who she takes from. And she doesn't give anything back.

These kids who sell it, they'll tell you. They don’t sell it because they are bad people. They sell it to stay alive. How else are people going to make money? Nobody wants to hire too many black people. So they think we are supposed to starve because they won’t give us jobs? Naw. People are going to try to stay alive, any way they can. That doesn't make you a villain. [The drug epidemic] is a tough problem. I really can’t say what the solution is. I think you need more education. Enforcement doesn't work. People need jobs. I think that’s one of the main things: jobs. I blew mine, but that doesn't mean I don’t know how important a job is. After the jobs, though, I don’t know. It’s tough.

* * *

Watson: Since the mid-1960s, American blacks have been fighting not a legal war against segregation, nor an insurmountable economic war against discrimination, but a profound psychological war for our own sense of self-worth. We are fighting to free ourselves of the psychological bondage to which Africans were subjected in this country. It is the damage that results when you distort a people’s belief in the cause-and-effect principle of the universe. It is the faith in this principle that motivates achievement and enables self-respect. It is the belief that effort produces results. It is the notion that “I can get what I want if I work hard enough, smart enough, long enough.” It is what teaches a human being to believe in productive labor. It is self-discipline.
Source: Los Angeles Times, March 12, 19, 1990.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: TWO BLACK GENERATIONS COLLIDE
In this account from the Los Angeles Times, two black men, Judge David W. Williams and Richard Winrow, who grew up in the same South Central neighborhood although in different eras, face each other in court. Their experience reflects the intersection of race and class in America.
U.S. District Court Judge David W. Williams, 79, grew up poor on 109th Street in South Central Los Angeles, raised in an era when it was still not allowed for blacks to buy homes west of Western Ave. Richard Winrow, 22, until Wednesday lived on 118th Street in South Central, a little more than a mile away from where the judge was raised. An A student before dropping out of high school from “sheer boredom,” Winrow was the youngest in a poor family of nine children. He was born in an era when blacks could move anywhere they liked, but few, including Winrow, could escape the poverty that surrounded them.

On Wednesday, the two men, separated by two generations but sharing similar roots, were brought together in Department 23 of U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles. In his courtroom, Williams--bound by a federal multiple offense law that forced his hand--dispatched Winrow to prison for the rest of his life, without the possibility of parole.

While of judicial interest as the first use of the mandatory sentence law in California, the courtroom paradox also raised fundamental and troubling questions about who fails in society, who succeeds, and why.

Named a student of the year in 8th grade at Ralph Bunche Junior High, Winrow was known as “the smartest kid in the neighborhood”--a child who it seems could easily have attended college and followed a career. Winrow’s family, which emotionally insisted upon his innocence Wednesday, said he had a chance to make it in life, but circumstances were always running against him. Relatives, reacting to the harshness of the sentence, found it hard to believe that the judge was a product of South Central himself.

“If that judge had ever been on this street, then he’d know what it was like,” said Vincent Scott, one of Richard’s six brothers. “[Williams] didn't grow up here. If he grew up in this neighborhood, how could he judge my brother?”

Today, East 118th Street and 109th Street mirror one another; both are lined with trees and modest homes. And children in both neighborhoods today have a high school dropout rate of nearly 50%. Gang graffiti mars industrial buildings that stand where grassy fields once were. Williams, long a resident of Bel-Air, is intimately familiar with South Central’s troubles, having presided over 4,000 criminal cases arising from the Watts riots of 1965, and watching jobs move out and crime go up in the area in more recent times. But he remembers a more nostalgic time, when he practiced law on Central Avenue and “people could stroll down the street without any premonition of danger.”

As Williams recalls, “the whole society was different” in South Central in the 1920s and 1930s. Social pressure was so great that if a boy got in trouble with the law, his family would pack up and move away.

“The neighborhoods were good, and if a kid was arrested, the shame of it would drive a family out,” he said in an interview. “Now the question [in the South Central area] is which families have not had a son arrested.”

No matter how bad the environment, Williams said, it does not provide an excuse for criminal behavior. “I blame the young people of my own race for not getting an education and for taking the easy way and for trafficking in drugs and joining gangs,” Williams said. “But there is blame to share, because our young people were not denied a chance for a job like they are today.”

At Winrow’s house on Wednesday, such sociological musings seemed off the mark. A member of the family had been sent off to prison for a long, long time, and those left behind did not seem to understand why. The family, so emotionally distraught over the sentence handed down by Williams, did not clearly understand that their brightest star would spend the rest of his life in prison. His mother, Lavern, believed the sentence would last only 20 years.

“I think it’s too stiff a penalty for a young man,” she said, speaking softly and holding back tears. If Winrow was guilty, then he should get “time to think about it, yes. But not 20 years.” Winrow had three prior narcotics violations when he was arrested last December in a raid on his East 118th Street home and charged with possessing 5.5 ounces of cocaine. Prosecutors identified him as a member of the Mona Park Crips. But family and friends all claimed he did not sell drugs and had never joined a gang. “Richard was not a dangerous person,” said Renee Scott, 28, his sister. “He was not a bad boy. These [gang members] around her, true, he knows them, but he was never a gangbanger.”... “They’re trying to use him as an example for all these other guys around here,” Renee said angrily. “They didn't do him right.

But Williams said Winrow’s gang and drug activities had been clearly proven. He also noted that Winrow’s attorney’s--two from Las Vegas and one from the Los Angeles area are “high priced lawyers... who handle large drug cases. No little kid from Watts is going to come up here with that kind of representation without a lot of financing behind him.” The sentence he handed down Wednesday nevertheless troubled Williams, who said he hopes the case will prompt a review by Congress of mandatory sentencing laws that preempt a judge’s ability to decide for themselves, but this is the law, and it’s my job and it’s up to Congress to do something about it...,” said Williams. “Let’s put it this way: today was the first time in 35 years as a judge that I have had to give anyone a life sentence.”

Winrow’s grieving family and friends couldn't fathom that he will not be coming home again. “Life without parole?,” said Betty Williams, a family friend and former neighbor. “That’s his whole life wasted.”
Source: Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1989.

PAN-AFRICANISM IN PORTLAND, 1991
In an article titled “African Americans Can Play Major Roles in Forming Stronger Ties Between Nations,” Oregonian reporter Osker Spicer describes the attempts by Portland blacks to promote economic Pan-Africanism.
What do Africa and African Americans mean to each other? And subsequently, what should Africa and the United States mean to each other? How best to strengthen ties between the world’s most prosperous country and its poorest continent was emotionally addressed--and productively answered--during a historic meeting this April between 1,000 African and African American leaders in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

But even closer to home, the Portland-based American African Trade Relations Association founded last year, is launching similar world wide efforts to promote healthy commercial, cultural, and educational U.S. African connections. George Amadi Ejim, president and founder of the Portland group, said that while the Abidjan summit meeting primarily rallied black African and African Americans, “we are going beyond that to more actively include African friends here and in Africa who are white. We want to see all of us come together.” “But no mater what we say about links between Africa and the United States, without African American entrepreneurs and organizations, it can’t work,” Ejim insisted. “I see African Americans as the bride. As Americans and as Africans they share both cultures. We need that connection. An African American can negotiate better in America for Africans and in Africa for Americans....”

The question of black America’s connections to Africa--commonly termed Pan Africanism--harks back to the early 1800s and to the first slaves. They, according to African scholar Ali Mazrui, were violently “dis-Africanized” with varied versions of the refrain, “forget that you are African, remember that you are black! Forget that you are African, remember that you are black!” Consequently, there is much to be learned and relearned; many blacks, just as most other Americans, are woefully uninformed about Africa. While the black consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s and recent political and social changes in Africa and the world have led to vast improvements, the Western media and educational system continue to distort and disregard vital African images and information.

However, it appears that the “First African and African American Summit”--at least the “first” for the current era--will help reconnect links and bear abundant fruit. The meetings--which included five African heads of state and representatives of nine other nations, as well as political, educational, and business leaders--was well planned and charted vital, realistic goals. Among the goals are improving African agriculture for domestic and foreign consumption and battling massive health problems, such as AIDS and river blindness, which afflict 40 million Africans. The summit also hopes to develop a massive educational program, including student-exchange fellowships, and to push for a policy of US support for Africa and for substantial increases in foreign aid for the continent.

On the other hand, [Rev. Leon] Sullivan emphasized Africa could be a “new frontier” for thousands of black Americans who are either underemployed, or merely interested in the challenges and rewards that helping Africa could bring. Such ventures, Sullivan projected, will generate new jobs and enterprises both in Africa and the United States.

In Portland, Ejim said that the American African Trade Relations Association already has established representatives in eight other US cities--Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, New York, Baltimore, Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans--and if officially involved with at least 10 African nations: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Zambia, Ivory Coast, Swaziland, and South Africa (via the anti-apartheid African National Congress). Ejim, a Nigerian citizen who has resided in the United States for 15 years, said that Portland will remain ATRA’s international headquarters....

“We should look beyond the distance,” Ejim said.... “Africans already trade extensively with Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China; they even trade with the Soviet Union...,” adding that it would be natural to expand such Pacific Rim trade into Oregon and other parts of the Northwest. “Right now there are from 44 to 50 businesses in Oregon doing business in Africa. Ejim and Gresham Mayor Gussie McRobert, who is also on the ATRA’s advisory board, will represent the region at a trade conference in Lagos, Nigeria, in July. The association helped coordinate the signing of a friendship pact between Mayor Enoch S. Msabaeka of Mutare, Zimbabwe, and Portland Mayor Bud Clark during its recent African trade forum in Portland.

The idea of stimulating US African trade and cultural bonds is not new. Such concepts and concerns were presented by many early 19th century black leaders, such as Dr. Martin R. Delaney, a Harvard-educated physician who, during the Civil War, became the first black major in the US Army. But before that, he led an expedition into the Niger Valley in West Africa, later publishing an official report of his explorations in a study that called for black investments in Africa.

And there was Paul Cuffee, a well known abolitionist and shipbuilder who carried 38 blacks to Africa in 1815 at his own expense and helped colonize the African nation of Liberia. In this century, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was dubbed the father of Pan Africanism. Du Bois, who also co-founded the NAACP in 1909, organized five Pan African Congresses, including sessions attended by attorney Beatrice Morrow Cannady, a pioneering Portland black newspaper editor and community activist... And the related Pan African conferences held in Ghana and Ethiopia in 1958 and 1963 produced the current Organization of African Unity. Predictably, efforts such as the recent Abidjan summit and the activities of the Portland-based ATRA will help bring to reality the dreams of countless sages past and present for not just stronger but mutually nurturing US-African ties.
Source: Portland Oregonian, June 9, 1991, p. C1, C4.

THE MULTICULTURAL AMERICAN WEST
In an essay describing my 1991 visit to the University of Colorado, Bill Hornby, senior editor of the Denver Post, discusses the growing recognition of the multiracial and multicultural Western half of the United States.
Dr. Quintard Taylor, professor of history at the University of Oregon, will deliver the Robert Athearn Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado, Tuesday night... His topic, “From ‘Freedom Now’ to ‘Black Power’: The Civil Rights Movement in Seattle, 1960-1970,” will cover ethnic relations in a significant Western city as “minority” groups move nearer to becoming “majority,” at least in political affairs. The Athearn Lecture is Colorado’s most prestigious forum for injecting new historical scholarship into the regional policy dialogue, and Taylor’s insights emphasize the West’s increasing congruence with an emerging world society. What do we mean by the grandiose term “world society”? In the October issue of American Demographics magazine, Martha Riche of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., puts it this way: “During the 1990s, the United States will shift from a society dominated by whites and rooted in Western (European) culture to a world society characterized by three large racial and ethnic minorities.”

One can drown swiftly in the sea of statistics supporting this assertion, but its truth is obvious in Colorado whose largest city is now run by a black mayor following on two terms of a Hispanic mayor. In our schools the growth of formerly “minority” populations is exploding.... By the end of the 21st century one-third of the nation’s school and college-age population will be non-white or Latino. As both Taylor and the Population Bureau’s research make clear, this coming population multiculturalism will by no means be unified politically, or lead to domination by any given group. Simplistically put, the ... Latino groups are split in political objectives between Americans who have Mexican roots in the Southwest, Cubans in Florida, and Puerto Ricans in the Northeast. The Clarence Thomas situation indicates the many differences of opinion in the black American community. Similar news is emerging from the Asian and Native America “blocs,” and indeed the supposed past unity and domination of whites is somewhat mythical; I seem to recall something about a Civil War.... The fact is that every major population group in our country is now a “minority,” as far as the percentage share of the population they represent.

What this means is that...we are in a transition to a multicultural society, in which the term minority will lose its meaning... Without fully realizing it, we have left the time when the nonwhite, non-Western (European) part of our population could be expected to assimilate to the dominant majority. In the future, the white Western majority will have to do some assimilation of its own. Government will find that as minority groups grow in size relative to one another... no single group will command the power to dictate solutions... Reaching consensus will require more cooperation than it has in the past. Historians have been slow to pick up on this shift of the nation a world multicultural society, particularly as relates to the American West where the John Wayne School dealt on Anglo glories. As modern historians such as Quintard Taylor attest, the West has always been one of the most multicultural, just as it has been one of the most international, regions of the nation. We are a charter member of the world society, but only lately, thanks to such as Taylor, are we remembering that.
Source: Denver Post, October 13, 1991

ETHNIC POPULATION DISTRIBUTION IN WASHINGTON, 2000
Washington Population Totals by Race/Ethnicity

(one Race or in Combination)

5,894,121 5,003,180 238,398 395,741 158,940 441,509

(One Race or in Combination)

Actual Population
Total Pop.* White Black Asian American Latino

Indian

1. Seattle 563,374 413,396 55,611 84,694 11,869 29,719

2. Spokane 195,629 181,072 5,834 5,910 5,966 5,857

3. Tacoma 193,556 143,426 26,461 7,043 18,731 13,262

4. Vancouver 143,560 126,605 4,727 2,952 8,034 9,035

5. Bellevue 109,569 84,329 2,860 924 20,841 5,827

6. Everett 91,488 77,476 3,909 2,557 6,991 6,539

7. Federal Way 83,259 60,930 8,012 1,758 11,919 6,266

8. Kent 79,524 59,617 7,869 1,749 9,074 6,466

9. Yakima 71,845 51,854 1,916 2,207 1,246 24,213

10. Bellingham 67,171 60,832 1,092 1,668 3,658 3,111

Percentage of Population by Race/Ethnicity of Ten Largest Cities in Washington, 2000

(One Race or in Combination)

1. Seattle 100 73.4 9.9 15.0 2.1 5.3

2. Spokane 100 92.6 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.3

3. Tacoma 100 74.1 13.7 3.6 9.7 6.9

4. Vancouver 100 88.2 3.3 2.1 5.6 6.3

5. Bellevue 100 77.0 2.6 0.8 19.0 5.3

6. Everett 100 84.7 4.3 2.8 7.6 7.1

7. Federal Way 100 73.2 9.6 2.1 14.3 7.5

8. Kent 100 75.0 9.9 2.2 11.4 8.1

9. Yakima 100 72.2 2.7 3.1 1.7 33.7

10. Bellingham 100 90.6 1.6 2.5 5.4 4.6
Source: U.S. Census, 2000
Western Black Population Growth, 1990-2000

1990 2000

Black Pop. Total Pop. Black Pop. Total Pop. Black%

Alaska 22,415 550,043 27,147 626,932 17.3

Arizona 110,524 3,665,228 185,599 5,130,632 40.5

California 2,208,801 29,760,021 2,513,041 33,871,648 12.1

Colorado 133,146 3,294,394 190,717 4,301,261 30.2

Hawaii 27,195 1,108,229 33,343 1,211,537 18.4

Idaho 3,370 1,006,749 8,127 1,293,953 58.5

Kansas 143,076 2,477,574 170,610 2,688,418 16.1

Montana 2,381 799,065 4,441 902,195 46.4

Nebraska 57,404 1,578,385 75,833 1,711,263 24.3

Nevada 78,771 1,201,833 150,508 1,998,257 47.6

New Mexico 30,210 1,515,069 42,412 1,819,046 28.7

North Dakota 3,542 638,800 5,372 642,200 34.4

Oklahoma 233,801 3,145,585 284,766 3,450,654 17.9

Oregon 46,178 2,842,321 72,647 3,421,399 36.4

South Dakota 3,258 696,004 6,687 754,844 57.2

Texas 2,021,632 16,986,510 2,493,057 20,851,820 19.0

Utah 11,576 1,722,850 24,382 2,233,169 52.5

Washington 149,801 4,866,692 238,398 4,866,692 37.1

Wyoming 3,606 453,588 4,863 493,782 25.8

Totals: 5,290,687 78,308,940 6,531,950 90,350,216 19.0

6.7% 7.2%